Huawei Ascend Mate hands on: First Impressions

Huawei Ascend Mate hands on preview

Undoubtedly we are inspired by Chinese technology, there are even some big OEMs manufactured or assembled their smartphones in China. But some of the China’s own players are now grabbing up the global market with their innovations. Huawei is the name in such players and the company is now becoming a smartphone brand with a number Ascend series Android smartphones. Huawei taken a step in the Indian phones market with some low-cost phones especially with partnering popular CDMA operators. Now as the era of smartphones peaked up, Huawei started focusing on smartphones and introduced its innovative flagship device as Ascend Mate at CES 2013. The Chinese brand recently brings the Ascend Mate in India with a whopping price tag to compete big OEMs as well as some renowned Indian vendors. We have got a chance to take a glimpse of the new innovative Huawei Ascend Mate at the press event in India so take a look at our hands on experience on the Ascend Mate.

Huawei Ascend Mate

Starting with the front, Huawei Ascend Mate has a 6.1-inch IPS+ display with 720 x 1280 pixels resolution. These days manufacturers moving towards massive display but handling of bigger display is of course an issue for the end-users. Huawei intelligently designed the Ascend Mate with slim bezels so that users can easily operate the Ascend Mate but still there is a need of two hand operations in some areas. The Ascend Mate is the current flagship device of Huawei and which is the reason the company put its all efforts to make it as a premium smartphone, the company earns success here. The smartphone has a combination of metal and plastic construction which makes it sturdy. Above the display, there is an earpiece, a front-facing 1.0-megapixel camera and a couple of sensors as proximity and ambient light sensors.

Huawei Ascend Mate easily fits in palm

On the left, there is a microSD card slot for expansion the built-in 8GB internal storage. Huawei has used aluminum finishing for the frame of the Ascend Mate which enhance the looks of the smartphone.

Huawei Ascend Mate left view

On the right, there is a power/lock key and a volume rocker. These are just two controls available on the Ascend Mate. Huawei has used some high-end buttons underneath for easy-to-use the controls.

Huawei Ascend Mate right view

On the top there is a microSIM card slot, a 3.5mm audio jack and a secondary microphone for noise cancellation. At the bottom, there is a microUSB port with a primary microphone.

Huawei Ascend Mate

Turning towards the rear, the Ascend Mate has plastic rear with matte finish. An 8-megapixel camera sensor is situated under the hump and an LED flash is available at the side of the sensor. A loud-speaker grill is available at the bottom for audio out.

Huawei Ascend Mate rear view

Overall, the designing of Huawei Ascend Mate is nice and in hands, the smartphone feels as a premium device. The Ascend Mate runs on Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) operating system out of the box and the company is also promising updates to some later versions. On the top of the operating system, Huawei has used its own Emotion UI. The Emotion UI does not have an app drawer for placing the app icons, instead users have to make a place right at the homescreen. App icons in the interface are round-edged with bright colors and there is a notification panel with a number of toggles, identical to Samsung Galaxy’s TouchWiz Nature UX. The Ascend Mate packs with a 4050mAh battery which is claimed to provide 2 days of complete backup against single charge.

Huawei Ascend Mate is powered by a Intel XMM620 chipset with the Huawei’s own Hi-Silicon quad-core 1.2GHz CPU. There is 1GB of RAM and 8GB internal storage. For connectivity, the smartphone has Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, A-GPS and a microUSB port. Considering the price of Rs.24,900 in the Indian market, the Ascend Mate has some impressive features which will induce Indian consumers over other competing large-display smartphones. We’ll cover more in our in-depth review, till then stay with us.